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Category: electronics – Page 30

Year 2009 This is awesome 👌 👏

The title character of Ray Bradbury’s book The Illustrated Man is covered with moving, shifting tattoos. If you look at them, they will tell you a story.

New LED tattoos from the University of Pennsylvania could make the Illustrated Man real (minus the creepy stories, of course). Researchers there are developing silicon-and-silk implantable devices which sit under the skin like a tattoo. Already implanted into mice, these tattoos could carry LEDs, turning your skin into a screen.

The silk substrate onto which the chips are mounted eventually dissolves away inside the body, leaving just the electronics behind. The silicon chips are around the length of a small grain of rice — about 1 millimeter, and just 250 nanometers thick. The sheet of silk will keep them in place, molding to the shape of the skin when saline solution is added.

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Diabetes tracking can be a scary and tedious task, but University of California at San Diego researchers have developed a needless glucose monitor tattoo sensor that measures insulin levels through sweat on the skin.

There are approximately 30.3 million people living with diabetes in the U.S., according to the American Diabetes Association. Monitoring blood sugar levels is an important part of managing their condition. For people like Angela Valdez, that daily task is avoided because of the traditional pricking of the finger.

“I don’t handle monitoring my diabetes as I should,” said Valdez in a press release. “I have the diet down a lot better now and I take my medication as I should, but the finger pricking is a struggle for me. I only test if I feel bad. If I don’t feel my blood sugar level is high, and I’m taking the pill every day, I think I’m alright. Which is really bad thinking, but the pin prick is terrifying.”

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What’s more, it can simultaneously capture information about the orientation, or “polarization,” of the waves in real-time, which existing devices cannot.

This information can be used to characterize materials that have asymmetrical molecules or to determine the surface topography of materials.

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Greenfluidics, a Mexico-based startup, promises newer, greener bio panels that can provide fresh oxygen and considerably bring down your power consumption while also delivering biomass-based fuel to you, New Atlas has reported.

With the world trying to reduce carbon emissions, algae have taken quite the center stage in capturing the carbon dioxide being released. From using algal blooms as large carbon capture sites to even powering electronic devices using algae, researchers are trying to use these green organisms everywhere.

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Scientists used the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a special telescope that extends for more than a mile under the Antarctic ice at the South Pole, to capture roughly 80 astrophysical neutrinos from a galaxy known as NGC 1,068, or Messier 77, which has an extremely active galactic core. The finding suggests that these active galaxies provide “a substantial contribution” to the abundance of astrophysical neutrinos, and therefore cosmic rays, that permeate through the universe, according to a study published on Thursday in Science.

“This is a very exciting result because for the first time, we actually understand that astrophysical neutrinos can be related to this very special type of galaxy,” said Theo Glauch, an experimental physicist at the Technical University of Munich and a co-author of the new study, in a call with Motherboard. “We physicists call them active galaxies because they’re very different from, for example, our Milky Way.”

Unlike our own galaxy, which is currently dormant, NGC 1,068 contains “an extremely bright environment which we can only study in neutrinos,” Glauch added. “Neutrinos are the only particles that can directly escape from the processes that drive this extremely high luminosity in the core of those galaxies.”

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When you hit your finger with a hammer, you feel the pain immediately. And you react immediately.

But what if the pain comes 20 minutes after the hit? By then, the injury might be harder to heal.

Scientists and engineers at Rice University say the same is true for the environment. If a in a river goes unnoticed for 20 minutes, it might be too late to remediate.

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Programmable bacteria attached to electrodes that deliver a electrical signal when the bacteria detect a target contaminant, enables real-time sensing, reports a study from Rice University. The engineered E.coli and electrodes are encapsulated in an agarose capsule to prevent the bacteria from falling off the electrodes. Prototypes developed by the team can detect contaminants in water such as thiosulfate and an endocrine disruptor in under five minutes.

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Sunshine streaming through a window could be directly harnessed for wireless data transmission to electronic devices. KAUST researchers have designed a smart glass system that can modulate the sunlight passing through it, encoding data into the light that can be detected and decoded by devices in the room. The use of sunlight to send data would offer a greener mode of communication compared to conventional Wi-Fi or cellular data transmission.

Basem Shihada had been exploring data encoding into an artificial light source when he had the lightbulb moment to use sunshine. “I was simply hoping to use a to record a video of the encoded light stream to try to decode the video to retrieve the data; that’s when I thought, why not do the same with the ?” Shihada recalls. “This would be much easier and can be done over the cell phone camera too. So we began to explore sunlight as an information carrier,” he says.

The team has now designed a sunlight communication system comprised of two parts. “There is a light modulator that can be embedded in a glass surface and an in-room receiver,” says Osama Amin, a research scientist in Shihada’s labs.

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